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hand on her head promptly shoved her back down...
    . . . where she decided she’d stay. With her hands clenched and her eyes tightly closed. God. She really was in trouble, wasn’t she?
    It was a lot more than Mick had bargained for. Not more than he could handle, of course. But whoever was after Shelby Simon was after her in a big way, and there was no reason to believe the guy would limit himself to letter bombs and no way to know how close he’d come to his target. The fucker could be anywhere—holed up in an eight-by-ten cabin in Montana like the infamous Una-bomber, or right here, right now, a mere three cars behind them in traffic. Until the investigators came up with some viable leads, Mick didn’t have a clue who or what he was dealing with. Other than a woman who didn’t seem to have sense enough to be afraid.
    Well, maybe a little afraid. She was still hunkered down on the passenger side, her legs—all six miles of them—curled under the dash and her head cradled in her arms on the seat. With her eyes closed, she might even have been asleep. Now that he really looked at her, she appeared to be a lot more relaxed than he was. For a minute he’d been tempted to say something reassuring to her, like “It’ll be okay.” But he decided against it. A little healthy fear was probably a good thing in this case.
    He pulled up in front of his apartment building on the near West Side—in actual distance only a matter of a few miles from the Canfield Towers, but light-years away in terms of style and status. In other words, the place was the pits, a three-story six-family brown brick box with a rotting roof, a broken concrete sidewalk, three boarded windows, and odors in the hallway thick enough to cut with a machete.
    The place was ideal for working undercover, and Mick really hadn’t minded that Home Sweet Home for the past two years was a one-bedroom rattrap on a bad street in a worse neighborhood. He actually liked it in a weird way because it sort of suited his prevailing moods. Still, it wasn’t anyplace he wanted to show off. Not to a woman like Shelby Simon, anyway.
    “We’re here,” he said. “You need to come inside with me. It’s not safe here out on the street.”
    She lifted her head, blinked her whiskey-colored eyes a few times, and looked out the window, showing very little change in her expression. At least there was no outright distaste or disgust that Mick was able to discern while watching her take in his street, his building, his native habitat. She didn’t say “Eeuuww” or “What a dump.” “Where’s here?” she asked.
    “My place. I’ve been working undercover so it’s not exactly a palace or anything.”
    “No, I guess not,” she said in a neutral sort of way. “Yeah, well...”
    He helped her and her six miles of stiff legs out of the car, then kept hold of her arm along the cracked and hazardous sidewalk to the front door of the building. As soon as he opened the door, they were greeted by a blast of rancid cooking oils and the underlying stench of urine and mold.
    Home sweet home.
    “Up here,” he said, starting up the dilapidated stairs to the second floor.
    “It’s dark.” She sounded a little tentative, nervously polite.
    “Dark. Yeah. Well, that’s probably a good thing.” It meant she couldn’t see the broken light fixture above them, the peeling hospital green paint, or the crud that coated the floor. One of these days, when he was done playing wigged-out doper, wanna-be gang banger, and all-around bad guy, he was going to go after the absentee landlord of this stinking hovel on behalf of Hattie Grimes and Lena Slotnik, the elderly tenants who lived here because they had no place else to go.
    “Here we are,” he said.
    He unlocked the upper and then the lower deadbolts, and pushed in the door, sniffing to make sure the half dozen or so air fresheners were still on the job. Of course, those didn’t always smell that great, either, because he always